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Ancient Olympic Games

The Greeks invented athleti contests and held them in honour of their gods. The Isthmos game were stagedevery two years at the Isthmos of Corinth. The Pythian games took place every four years near Delphi. But the most famous games were those at Olympia, a town in south- western Greece. These took place every four years. The ancient Olympics seem to have begun in the early 700 BC, in honour of Zeus the father of the Greek gods and goddesses. No women were allowed to watch the games. Pottery dating from around 550 BC shows men taking part in the games naked or wearing only a thong.

The games were greatly expanded from a one-day festival of athletics and wrestling to, in 472 BC, five days with many events. The order of the events is not precisely known, but the first day of the festival was devoted to sacrifices. On the second day, the foot-race, the main event of the games, took place in the stadium, an oblong area enclosed by sloping banks of earth. On other days, wrestling, boxing, and the pancratium, a combination of the two, were held. In wrestling, the aim was to throw the opponent to the ground three times. Boxing became more and more brutal; at first the pugilists wound straps of soft leather over their fingers as a means of deadening the blows, but in later times hard leather, sometimes weighted with metal, was used. In the pancratium, the most rigorous of the sports, the contest continued until one or the other of the participants acknowledged defeat. Horse-racing, in which each entrant owned his horse, was confined to the wealthy but was nevertheless a popular attraction. After the horse-racing came the pentathlon, a series of five events: sprinting, long-jumping, javelin-hurling, discus-throwing, and wrestling.

Women were not allowed to go to the Olympic games, but they did have their own festival at Olympia once every four years. It was called the Heraia and was held in honour of Hera, wife of Zeus. The events there were all running races, and unmarried girls took part. Winners were awarded crowns of sacred olive branches, the same as men.

The Greeks took games of all kinds very seriously, but especially physical athletic competition. The Greeks believed that their gods particularly loved to see strong, fit, graceful human bodies, especially boys' and men's bodies. So one way to get on the good side of the gods was to exercise, to eat right, to oil your skin, to create a beautiful body that the gods would love. Because of the Greek tendency to turn everything into an a competition, this also meant that there were a lot of athletic competitions in Greece. The most famous of these is the Olympic Games, but there were other games held in other places as well, like the Isthmian Games at Corinth.

Young men in most Greek cities spent a lot of their time training for these competitions, and the best of them were chosen to compete against the best young men from other cities. Then they would all meet, at the Olympic Games or the Isthmian Games or elsewhere, and compete for prizes and for the favour of the gods. Of course these games also served as good training for the army, because all these men would be soldiers as well. The events were the same kind as in the Olympics today: running, jumping, throwing a javelin, and throwing a discus. Only men could compete. Greek boys also played games which were not part of the Olympic games, like field hockey.